The Art of the CRM (and why you should prio using one)

how are folks not using these things - a discussion of how ~to~ use one

I Just Find it Funny That…

As I’ve gone earlier and earlier in the startup world it’s been rather impressive to see just how many teams are generating millions of dollars of ARR and don’t have or use a CRM (customer relationship management) consistently. It’s actually mind blowing.

So much of the modern tech stack plugs into your CRM these days, from GTM tools, to finance tools, to tons else. Certainly you can make the argument that at the earliest stages, it is more important to focus on product velocity and output than focusing time and effort on a glorified database, but I just laugh every time I meet a 1M+ ARR company without a well ironed out, or at least light weight CRM instance they are using.

I think it’s a huge red flag if deals are living only in founders’ heads or their DMs.

Before I joined Unify I started following a bunch of the Instagram meme accounts for sales / GTM humor. I’ve never been an AE / BDR so I wouldnt know what its like to be a commission earning rep but these memes are hilarious. All the memes were about reps forgetting to, refusing to, or not knowing how to update CRM. I can understand it to an extent: you’re so focused on generating business and closing your book of business that you don’t necessarily want to prioritize contributing to a bunch of “seemingly” arbitrary documentation.

But making the CRM your source of truth is so important. For day to day operations and managing deal flow, to helping any individual instantly know what the latest status is with an existing account, to learning the different types of accounts that your Company works with (Customers, Competitors, Partners, etc.).

In this little post I’m going to just share a few of the reasons I love using CRMs for record-keeping, why you should to, and some of the minimum things you can implement to know you’re doing the very bare minimum until you hire a revops / bizops person in charge of making it more official :) And if you are looking for that person, let me know, I know a handful of awesome folks!

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What a CRM actually is

If this is net new information to you or you aren’t skipping this section, you’re part of the problem 🤣

A CRM is just a structured place to store four things:

• Who you are talking to (Companies, Contacts)

• What is happening with them (Deals / Opportunities)

• What has happened (email, notes, calls, meetings)

• What is supposed to happen next (tasks, next steps, dates)

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Why to Implement

It’s no wonder Salesforce and Hubspot in aggregate have a market cap of >$240 Billion. So why should you start using a CRM from the earliest stages?

• Well first off a few convenient features

  • Hubspot and Attio both have generous free plans

  • They help you track emails and send templated emails very easily

  • You can get free calendar links thru them

  • These are all no brainers for someone looking to start building that Revops repore but also for recurring day to day ops you need for your biz

Onto the more juicy stuff:

• Integrations: As you scale there’s so many things that plug into your CRM, from outbound tools, to call recording tools, to inbound tools, etc.

  • You are missing out on all the functionality and leverage these systems give you

• Record Keeping & Access to Data: As you hire, anyone customer facing will need to see what the latest is for any customer notes, open opps in the pipeline, reasons for closed lost opps, the nature of your competitors, and more. This makes onboarding faster

• List Building: The criteria you use to segment Companies and Contacts is so important! Whether its making a list of Customers, Competitors, Partners, etc. that the whole company can refer to. Or segmenting by industry / other fields!

• Reporting: This is the real reason teams need CRMs, for reporting. Because most founders don’t give up a board seat prior to the Series A, this tends to take a backseat. But really you can make your sales process repeatable by being highly analytical and data-driven in how you evaluate your pipeline and the resulting funnel.

  • How are we performing relative to goal?

  • Which campaign source for opps has the great closed won conversion?

  • Which opps are stalling and we haven’t followed up with

And dozens more

When should you start using a CRM?

Ideally? Yesterday. The moment you have more than 5-10 active accounts you’re having conversations with or have an actual AE outside of the founder.

The earlier you start, the better off you’ll be. And if you use Hubspot for marketing / newsletters, this means you can mass email your friends, family, and customers earlier and with more consistency than you might otherwise.

Which CRM should I get?

There’s tons of new CRMs every day. The core ones I know / rep are:

1. Salesforce - buy if youre going to build the next multi-billion dollar company

2. Hubspot - buy if you want to maybe build a billion dollar company or if you want people to move far more effiicently when using CRM. This is my typical recommendation

Hubspot and Salesforce are most folks’s typical recommendations because not only can big companies be built on them, but they also have solved some large RevOps problems over the years and also have the most thorough integration potential.

1. Attio - buy if you hate CRMs but want something far easier.

2. AI CRMs - new age AI CRMs, havent seen these be used by large companies to date.

   1. Octolane - Duke founders!

   2. Lightfield - from the Tome team

   3. Clarify.ai - have heard great things

   4. Day AI

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Build your MV-CRM (Minimum Viable CRM)

There’s only a handful of things that I think, if you can do, puts you in a great place.

1. Add all the Companies, People, and entities to your CRM that you’ve interacted with to date.

   1. For Companies, categorize them using a “Type” field into Customers, Competitors, Partners, Investor, News/Media, etc.

   2. For Contacts, to the extent you can, associate them with the proper Company and then categorize them using a “Persona” field into one of your various business personas (Sales Leader, Marketing Leader, etc.), and create a few extra ones for random folks that you engage with like “Friends”, “Family”, “Investors”, etc.

   3. Down the line, this will help you with the first 3 bullets in the previous section

2. Decide what your sales process looks like in CRM.

   1. Deal Stages: Pick the “stages” you will use and don’t overcomplicate it more than necessary.

      1. Meeting Booked, Opportunity Qualified (this would be post the first call and they express continued interest), Discovery (deeper exploration of the use-case), Negotiation, Contract Sent, Closed Won / Closed Lost

         1. Some might even say the above list of 6 stages is too many. Don’t do too many, the more hurdles you add, the less it will be used and the more misunderstood the process will be for other folks on your team

         2. There should never be a deal created unless a Company is in an active deal evaluation process

      2. Deal Details: Identify the fields that you care about for each deal

         1. Internal Owner - Who is the person internally that is responsible for owning and working this deal. Is it a founder, an AE, etc? This is super important for accountability

         2. Campaign Source - This is sadly such a slept-on field. Where did this opportunity come from? Make this a set picklist of a select set of options. Inbound, Manual Outbound (BDRs), Automated Outbound, Referrals, Events, Conferences, Paid Traffic , etc.

            1. This will allow you to see a breakdown of where opps are coming from every month!

         3. Use Case - Make a multi-select field that contains the primary reasons the prospect is interested in your product. This will help to cater your comms with them when you make updates to certain parts of the surface area

         4. Plan Type - Create a picklist of plan types so that you can pivot opportunities by the size / type of deal

         5. Amount / Contract Value - this is a default field but good to always put a placeholder value

         6. Decision Maker - Once you identify the Person who is a buyer / decision maker, you can keep them in this field.

         7. Closed Lost Reason - This is a key learning field. Why did you lose this deal? Was it for budget reasons? Was it to a competitor? Did they go silent / ghost? Are they too big / too small? Was the pain not acute enough. Pick a list of your top 5-7 reasons here and reflect them.

         8. Next Step - This is what powers “what do I do today” views and stops deals from just sitting in “Discovery” forever.

         9. Pipeline - A way to categorize what “deals” are closable sales opportunities versus which opps might be better classified as opps for Partners, Affiliates, etc.

3. Standardize and document this process and share it with your team.

   1. Write and build docs with the process you want to use, and then provide it to the team and make sure they adhere to it. Good data = good company! The motto I like is “if it isn’t in CRM, then it didn’t happen”

   • Every deal must have:

     • An up to date stage

     • A clear next step and date

     • An internal owner

   • Every week:

     • Reps clean their pipeline: kill zombie opps, update stages, add notes from calls

     • Founder / sales lead reviews:

       • Top deals this month

       • Slipping deals (close date moved multiple times)

   • Every activity:

     • Log notes in the CRM, not in personal docs

     • BCC the CRM email or use the Gmail / Outlook plugin so every email is attached to the contact and deal

4. Build lightweight reporting for month over month review. Prioritize a few key charts

   1. Pipeline generated each month stacked by campaign source

   2. Pipeline closed each month stacked by campaign source

   3. Closed Lost Deals by Month stacked by Closed Lost Reason

   4. Active deals and their current status / stage

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Where does CRM go long term?

Once you start using your CRM and populate it with good information, you can start do to tons of more advanced things with it that are great steps for growing your business.

Some of these may even require actual help in managing your CRM which is inevitable, leading to the photo above :)

• Customer success:

  • Track onboarding stages and health

  • Add “Renewal date”, “Plan size”, “Champion” fields on the company

  • Renewal / expansion deals with their own pipeline

• Product:

  • Log feature requests on the company / contact

  • Use “Use Case” and “Industry” to slice feedback by segment

• Finance / ops:

  • High level “bookings” view from CRM, which reconciles against Stripe / billing

  • Being able to answer “Where did this customer come from, what did we sell them, and who sold it?”

• A simple “forecast categories” concept:

  • Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed Won

• A note on the power of being able to tell your board:

  • “We have $X in Commit, $Y in Best Case, and our historical win rates by stage look like Z, so here is what we expect next quarter”

Pitfalls and anti patterns

• Do not:

  • Create 200 fields because “we might use that one day”

  • Let everyone create their own fields with slightly different names

  • Have 18 pipeline stages that no one understands

  • Use free form text for things that should be picklists (industry, campaign source, plan type)

• Do:

  • Review your fields and pipeline once per quarter and delete / collapse what is unused

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Below I’m going to share some fields that I like to spin up that are “Intent Signal” related but i’ll leave you with this:

Once you run your company on your CRM, everything becomes easier: forecasting, hiring, onboarding, GTM planning, raising money, and understanding what’s actually happening in your business :)

Example Fields

If you want to take a second step for signal based CRM fields, I’d recommend adding some of the below:

Company Fields

• Industry Classification - AI - Picklist

Signal Fields

• Latest Signal Name - Text

• Latest Signal Date - Date

Website Visitor

• Website Visitor - Date - Date

• Website Visitor - Name - Text

• Website Visitor - URL - URL

Job Posting

• Job Posting - Date - Date

• Job Posting - Title - Text

• Job Posting - URL - URL

New Hire

• New Hire Date - Date

• New Hire Name - Text

• New Hire Linkedin - URL

Promotion

• Promotion Date - Date

• Promotion Name - Text

• Promotion Linkedin - URL

Company Post Liker

• Linkedin Post Liker - Date

• Linkedin Post Name - Text

• Linkedin Post Link - URL

Competitor Liker

• Competitor Post Liker - Date

• Competitor Post Name - Text

• Competitor Post Link - URL

Linkedin Page Follower

• Followed Linkedin Page - Date - Date

• Followed Linkedin Page - Name - Text

• Followed Linkedin Page - Link - URL

News Signals

• News Signal - Name - Text

• News Signal - Date - Date

• News Signal - Link - URL

Marketing Fields

• Downloaded Content Name - Text

• Downloaded Content Date - Date

• Recent Event - Date

• Conference - Text

Contact Fields

• Persona - Picklist

• Latest Signal Name - Text

• Latest Signal Date - Date

• Visited Website Date - Date

• Downloaded Content Date - Date

• Latest Signal Name - Text

• Latest Signal Date - Date

• New Hire - Date

• Promotion - Date

• Conference - Text

• Company Linkedin Post Liker - Date - Date

• Company Linkedin Post Liker - Link - URL

• Competitor Post Liker - Date - Date

• Competitor Post Liker - Link - URL

• Followed Linkedin Page - Date - Date

Other

• Downloaded Content Name - Text